indra sinha's bookworld

INDRA SINHA
Booker nominee

Your favourite book?
Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, for the sheer beauty of the writing.

How many books do you own?
About 9,000. We’re trying to cut down to essentials. (www.indrasinha. com/library.html)

Your favourite character?
Mowgli, from The Jungle Book. As a child running wild in the western ghats I yearned to be him. Animal in Animal’s People is perhaps a sort of inverse Mowgli.

Last book bought?
An Ancient Jewish Christian Source on the History of Christianity: Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions by F. Stanley Jones — part of the research for my next novel.

Last book read?
A General History of the Pyrates by Daniel Defoe — more swashbuckle than Johnny Depp. Before that, I read In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh; I came to like him more and more with every page.

Your favourite genre?
The classic novel: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Dickens’ Hard Times, Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie, John Fowles’ Daniel Martin, Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. I also love the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

Books you wish you had written?
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; anything by Saadat Hasan Manto.

A book you’ve always wanted to read but haven’t?
Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce It’s like a really fine whisky, to be taken in small sips and savoured. I’ve never managed more than a few sips at a time — unlike whisky.